Present moment, past, and future: mental kaleidoscope

It is the every person’s daily phenomenal experience that conscious states represent their contents as occurring now. Following Droege (2009) we could state that consciousness has a peculiar affinity for presence. Some researchers even argue that conscious awareness necessarily demands that mental content is somehow held “frozen” within a discrete progressive present moment (James, 1890; Lynds, 2003). Thus, phenomenal content seems to beminimally conscious if it is integrated into a single and coherent model of reality during a “virtual window” of presence (Metzinger, 2003; see also Brown, 1998; Varela, 1999; Smythies, 2003). In order to explain such features of consciousness as phenomenal unity and continuity within the current present along with a succession of discrete thoughts that give rise to feeling of the past and future, a reference to mechanisms outside the phenomenal realm is necessary (Revonsuo, 2003). Thus, the question of what could be the neurophysiological mechanisms responsible for these experiences should be addressed. In this Opinion Article we shall build our argument based on the biological realism approach to consciousness proposed by Revonsuo (2006). According to this approach, subjective consciousness is a real phenomenon that is tightly anchored to a biological reality within the human brain. Broadly speaking, the human brain is the specific physical “location,” where the subjective mental reality and the objective neurobiological reality are intimately connected along a unified metastable continuum (Fingelkurts et al., 2009, 2013). We have argued previously (Fingelkurts et al., 2010) that phenomenal consciousness refers to a higher level of organization in the brain and captures all immediate and undeniable (from the first-person perspective) phenomena of subjective experiences (hearing, seeing, touching, feeling, embodiment, moving, and thinking) that present to any person right now (subjective present) and right here (subjective space). By this definition even remembering the past images and planning the future events can’t be performed other than in the present moment and in relation to current state of affairs (see also Lynds, 2003; Droege, 2009). This is so because someone possesses phenomenal consciousness if there is any type of subjective experiences that is currently present for him/her (Fingelkurts et al., 2010). In this context what is presented as now is not simply whatever sensory or other representations occur in the brain at any given moment but rather the spatialtemporal hierarchy of selected and nested metastable states of neuronal assemblies that serve in real time as a basis for the subjective experiences of the “present moment.” Among many theories, the Operational Architectonics (OA) theory of brain and mind functioning (Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts, 2001, 2008; Fingelkurts et al., 2010, 2013) explicitly utilizes the hierarchy of nested metastable states of neuronal assemblies. In short, OA theory is centered on the notion of operation. Operation is broadly defined as the process or state of being in effect and it has a beginning and an end (Collins Essential English Dictionary, 2006). In fact, everything which can be represented by a process is an operation. The notion of operation plays a central role in bridging the brain-mind gap and makes it possible to identify what at the same time belongs to the mental level and to the neurophysiological level of brain activity organization, and acts as a mediator between the two (Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts, 2001, 2008; Benedetti et al., 2010). Understanding of the operation as a process and considering its combinatorial nature, seems especially well suited for describing and studying the mechanisms of how information about the objective physical entities of the external world can be integrated within the present moment in the internal subjective domain by means of entities of distributed neuronal assemblies (Fingelkurts et al., 2010, 2013). In line with this conceptualization, simple cognitive operations that present some partial aspect of the whole object/scene/concept are presented in the brain by local 3D-fields produced by discrete and transient neuronal assemblies, which can be recorded by an electroencephalogram (EEG) (Figures 1A,B). More complex operations that constitute the whole object or scene are brought into existence by joint (synchronized) simple operations in the form of coupled 3D-fields—so called operational modules (OMs) of varied complexity (Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts, in press). Further synchronization of several OMs (complex field spatial-temporal patterns; Figure 1A) forms even more coarse scales of nested functional hierarchy (Feinberg, 2000) that is now able to present and hold highly complex sensorial inputs as coherent perceptions of the world, create internal complex images and form conscious decisions (Fingelkurts et al., 2010, 2013). The recombination of neuronal assemblies and their operational modules into new configurations gives rise to a nearly inexhaustible source of presenting different qualities, patterns, objects, scenes, concepts and decisions.